


hollow hearts and hateful souls

by SarsparillaSparrow (Bundibird)



Series: Window to the Soul [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: (initially! They work it all out in the end - I promise), Aromantic Toph, Bad childhoods, M/M, Slow Burn, Soulmate AU, dear merlin how did I end up writing a slow burn, sokka & toph friendship, soulmate rejection, the LONG AWAITED SOULMATE AU, the eyes are the window to the soul, this series will include:
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:20:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23439082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bundibird/pseuds/SarsparillaSparrow
Summary: A person's eye colour isn't based on that of their parents, or on genetics, or even on their nation. A person's eye-colour reflects the nation that their soulmate belongs to. Most watertribe children have blue eyes. It's rare for a child of the moon to find their heart's echo in someone from another nation. But Hakoda's children are different. Katara's eyes are an impossible grey - a colour no one has seen in a century; not since the Air Nomads were slaughtered. And Sokka - Sokka's eyes are a hateful, disgraceful orange.
Relationships: Aang/Katara (Avatar), Sokka/Zuko (Avatar)
Series: Window to the Soul [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1686181
Comments: 744
Kudos: 9045
Collections: Finished111, Zuko and The Water Tribe, zukkaforthebenders





	hollow hearts and hateful souls

**Author's Note:**

> [Posting for the first time under this Pseud, because I’ve decided to house any and all romance fics under this name and keep Bundibird for genfics, so if you’re wondering when the hell you signed up to some chick called SarsparillaSparrow – you didn’t. You signed up to Bundibird, but you get alerts for my Pseuds too. :) ]
> 
> So… this fic slapped me out of nowhere one day, and then I just… could not stop writing it?? I haven’t had such insatiable inspiration for…. ages. I actually can’t remember when. All of your encouragement on Tumblr absolutely helped, so thank you all! Now, the Sokka we meet in this fic is a bit different to canon Sokka at the beginning, in a few ways. He’s still Sokka, but he’s a Sokka we might get after a childhood of isolation and unrelenting rejection, so he's more serious, and also has a few other hangups. He starts to grow back into the Sokka we know from the show eventually, but if you’re wondering “Where’s my silly dorky boy?” well, he’s in there. He’s just buried a bit to start with.

Sokka hates his eyes. 

So does everyone in his village. 

Oh, some of them try to hide it. Avert their gaze instead of looking at him dead-on, so they don't have to see his eyes – see the way his irises shine in the winter sun with the colour of... of _evil_. 

Fire Nation orange. That's the colour that stains Sokka's eyes. Orange like the setting sun. Orange like the embers in a campfire that's burning low. 

The orange of the people who have waged war on the world for over a century. The people who wiped out the Air Nomads; the nation that reduced the once-thriving South Pole to little more than a single village of ramshackle igloos. 

Sokka’s soulmate – whoever they are – belongs to the evilest nation on earth, and everyone in his village knows it, and hates it. Hates _him._

The villagers who try to be subtle about their hatred talk to him (when they _have_ to talk to him) in overly cheerful voices to hide the disgust they're truly feeling. They don’t look at him directly and they put on an exaggerated friendliness that Sokka’s been able to see through for years.

(He worked out a while ago that it’s because they’re scared of him. They fake cheerfulness and friendliness because they’re masking their fear of him; because they want to keep him onside, instead of offending him, ‘cause who knows _what_ he might do to them if they offend him. Maybe he’ll sacrifice their children to the sun gods, or something. So they pretend to be friendly because they fear what he would do if he saw how they truly feel about him.)

Frankly, he'd rather see their disgust. At least that's honest. 

Most of his tribemates, though, don't bother hide their disgust. Their hatred.

Whispers of _traitor_ and _burnt soul_ and _flamelover_ have been hissed in Sokka's wake since before he knew what the words meant – before he knew what the colour of his eyes meant.

From those people, Sokka has a tapestry of small scars across his body, and an unending list of bruises that have healed one by one; have faded from black to purple to yellow before vanishing entirely, until it’s like they were never there. Almost all of them are from minor "accidental" altercations here and there from folks who _just so happened_ to move their foot _just_ in time to trip Sokka up, or who "misjudged" the width of their shoulders as they passed him, bumping into him with enough force to leave him stumbling. 

Over time, Sokka's learnt how to dodge those "accidents." He's light and quick on his feet, these days, and always extra alert whenever he's near other people. He hasn't been tripped by a rouge foot or shoulder-checked by a passerby for ages now – though not for lack of trying, on their part.

Of course, the trippings and the bumps are the least of it. Those are minor. Sokka's come home more times than he can count, limping and bruised because a bunch of older boys took offence to his eyes and decided to take their anger out on his flesh. It’s usually when he’s out on a hunting trip with the other young adults, or – once he stopped hunting with anyone other than his family – it’s when they catch him practicing with his boomerang by himself behind the igloos, or it’s in the dark during the long sunless winters when they can catch him unawares while on his way from one hut to another, or any other time they can catch him off guard.

He's learnt to _always_ been on guard, thanks to them – and he’s become a pretty good fighter, too, thanks to their on-going attacks. 

Even his own family hate his eyes. 

Gran-gran always looks grieved when she talks to him, like she's devastated on his behalf that his soulmate is a child of the sun. Sokka has never been able to work out if she's saddened by the fact that her grandson's heart-echo belongs to someone evil, or if she's saddened that her grandson himself is evil.

Because he must be – if you listen to the whispers in the village, at least. For his soulmate to be someone from the Fire Nation, how dark must Sokka's soul be, they wonder in barely hushed whispers. The Fire Nation is evil, they whisper. So anyone bonded to one of their people must be evil as well.

(Sokka doesn't _feel_ evil. But then... would he know? Maybe he is. The other half of his soul is someone from the _Fire Nation,_ after all.)

So Gran Gran looks him in the eyes, but it’s never for very long before she has to look away, and the grief in her face is somehow more painful than the way she can’t look at him for longer than a few seconds. So over time, Sokka learns to stop looking her in the face too.

She doesn’t look at him, and he doesn’t look at her. That way, he doesn’t see her grief.

Hakoda never makes eye-contact with Sokka either, if he can help it. 

He'll look at Sokka's chin when he’s talking to his son, or at his ear, or just not at him at all – will focus his gaze on whatever task he’s doing, or will look out at the horizon, or will keep his gaze on the flickering cooking fire.

Whenever he _does_ accidentally lock eyes with Sokka, it’s never for more than a second before the Chief's mouth presses into a thin line of tangled emotions and he looks harshly away.

There's grief there, in the press of his lips, same as Gran Gran. There's disappointment, too, and anger, as well as the same disgust that matches the rest of the villagers.

Sokka’s learnt not to look him in the face either.

And it’s not that Hakoda is a bad dad. He never says anything cruel to Sokka, and never outright neglects him either. Sokka is kept well fed and in suitably warm clothes that fit him well, and Hakoda still teaches him everything that a father should teach his son – how to fish and hunt and sail and fight – but he just... does it without looking at him. Without addressing the elephant-whale in the room. 

At least he doesn't pretend to be cheerful and friendly, Sokka thinks. It would be worse, if Hakoda tried to hide his disgust and disappointment under a layer of false fondness. 

And sure, it hurts – especially to see the way Hakoda interacts with Katara; all smiles and hugs and laughter and unflinching eye-contact. But Sokka still prefers the brutal honesty, rather than masks of insincerity.

As for Katara – she’s… different to the others.

Katara is... conflicted.

She used to treat Sokka normally. Back when they were just young kids. Back when their mother was still alive.

(Actually, the last time anyone looked Sokka in the eyes without flinching was back when his mother was alive. The villagers all shied away from him, even then – refused to engage with him; mostly just tried to ignore his presence entirely – but Kya… Kya never made Sokka feel dirty for the colour of his eyes. Kya never shied away from him. Kya looked him in the eyes and told him how much she loved him, right up until the day she said it for the last time.)

Hakoda didn't avoid Sokka's eyes either, back then, and Katara didn't know anything more than that she and her brother were the only ones in the village who didn't have blue eyes. She didn't know what it meant yet. And she didn't know that even though neither of them had blue eyes, it was still different for them. She didn’t know that they weren’t the same in their difference.

Because they're both different to the rest of their village, sure, but they're different to each other, too. 

Because Sokka’s eyes mark him as an outcast, but Katara's grey eyes mark her as a tragedy. A love lost before it could bloom. Or so the villagers say, at least. Grey is for the Air Nomads, after all, and there are no more Air Nomads.

Katara is more optimistic than that. She doesn't know what her eyes mean – doesn't know how they're possible – but she believes she has a soulmate out there somewhere, somehow. The Spirits wouldn't be so unkind, she says, as to saddle her with a soulmate who's already left the world, or who never entered it in the first place. 

Sokka isn't so sure about the kindness of Spirits. 

If the Spirits were kind, they wouldn't have saddled him with the eye colour of an evil nation. If the Spirits were kind, they wouldn't have taken his mother away. 

See – that's when it all changed, for Katara. The Fire Nation had only been a distant concept for her, before then. The villains in the stories they and the other children were told around the campfire. Distant figures of history that had made an impact on their home long before Katara was even born, but not one that she'd ever conceived of as existing in her sphere. Not a real life bunch of people who could – and would – impact her life on a personal level. 

The day Kya was killed was the day that Katara's view of Sokka changed, too. 

Their mother's body was not yet cool, the black snow still falling thickly from the sky as the Fire Nation ships left. Hakoda and Gran Gran had still been with Kya – helping to guide her soul to the Spirit World as the Elder spoke the words of Final Peace – and Katara and Sokka had been shepherded from the tent; told to wait with the women and other children.

It was one of those other children who'd done it. Who taught Katara what Sokka's eyes meant. Who forever changed her view of the brother that she had loved unreservedly before that moment.

She had been upset – crying into Sokka's parka and trying to wrap her young brain around what had happened – and one of the boys (Amaruq, his name was – older than Sokka by two years, but still too young to fight or to help in the clean-up) had told her to stop looking to a _traitor_ for comfort. 

She hadn't known what he'd meant – though Sokka had. He'd learnt, by that stage, what the word meant and why it was hurled at him, but he’d never felt it more keenly before that moment. 

He’d always been baffled by it, before. Upset by it too, obviously, but his upset had come from a place of confusion. He hadn’t understood why they could call him a traitor when he hadn’t even _met_ a Fire Nation person. When he had never _wanted_ to meet someone from the Fire Nation. When he was loyal to the Water Tribe, and only to the Water Tribe.

But that day – when the word was spat at him for the first time since the Raiders had attacked their village, unprovoked; for the first time since Kya’s _death_ at the hands of Fire Nation soldiers – the word had burned painfully against Sokka’s heart like a brand, and he hadn’t been able to speak up and try to keep Amaruq from shattering Katara’s world view.

The women watching over the children hadn't intervened as Amaruq told Katara that her brother's eyes were orange because his soulmate was one of _them –_ one of the sorts of people who'd just stormed into their village and burnt down their homes and killed their people. Killed Katara's _mother._

Of course – Katara had known, before then, that Sokka's eyes were orange. It’s a hard thing to miss.

And she'd known that orange eyes meant that you had a Fire Nation soulmate, and that the Fire Nation were the bad guys. But she hadn't quite put both those two things together. She’d been too young, still, and they'd both been distant concepts to her. The Fire Nation were the bad guys, sure, but they were far away, and – on an entirely separate topic – Sokka's orange eyes meant nothing more than that, like hers, his soulmate wasn't here. His eyes had simply meant that he would probably have to travel to find his other half one day, just like she would; if their other halves didn't find them first, that is. She'd never pieced together that Sokka's soulmate belonged to the same people as the bad guys from the stories. 

She'd looked at him differently, after Amaruq had harshly explained it to her, unable to reconcile the brother who taught her how to make snow-people with the person who had a Fire Nation soulmate. 

And it’s not that Katara _hates_ Sokka – not at all. She loves him, in fact, and stands up for him when she feels she has to (which is both embarrassing and heartwarming, to watch his little sister stand up in his defence) – but she hates his _eyes._

Katara looks at his eyes, and she sees the people who killed their mother. She looks at his eyes and sees the shadow – the threat, the _evil –_ of the Fire Nation. 

So it's... complicated, with Katara. She doesn’t look at him, but she stands by him, so it's better with her than with everyone else in the Village, and Sokka loves her and is grateful for her even though she can't look him in the eyes. 

…………………………………………………………………………….

Sokka hardens, over the years. Learns to ignore the whispers, learns to dodge the sneak attacks. Gets better and better at fighting, because once Hakoda allows him to join the Warrior Training with the rest of the slightly-older children, the other boys use it as an opportunity to beat him up without fear of repercussion. So Sokka learns how to be faster, learns to strike harder, learns to be _smarter_.

He stops expecting anyone to look at him without either outright or veiled disgust, and he gets into the habit of never making eye contact with anyone. If he’s not looking at them, then he won’t see their hatred for him.

And yet, despite the village’s attitudes (or is it _because of?)_ there’s a large part of him that still yearns for their acceptance. That wants desperately for them to take him for who he is, and not who his eyes say his soul is one day destined to be with.

So he was already training hard, but he starts to train _harder_.

No one will think he's evil, after all, if he one day grows into the village's greatest warrior – their foremost defender; their staunchest protector. 

And if he kills every single Fire Nation soldier he ever encounters, then no one can accuse him of being a traitor. No one can say he’ll choose the Fire Nation over the Sothern Water Tribe. No one will call him evil. No one will whisper in his wake or watch him suspiciously out the corner of their eyes.

It's a child's dream. Become the village hero and they'll accept you. Become the village hero and they'll love you. 

A child's dream, but one that keeps him going for many years. 

.................................................................................

The war drifts closer to their shores, and Hakoda rounds up all the men and the boys who are old enough, and they go to fight. 

If they can stop the fight on Earth Kingdom shores, the Chief argues, then the black snow will never darken Water Tribe waters again. They'll be safe. 

Fourteen year old Sokka begs to go – begs to join his father and the other warriors on this quest to defeat the Fire Nation – but the cut off age for warriors allowed on the journey is, conveniently, just a little bit older than Sokka is. Fifteen years old is old enough to fight the Fire Nation. Fourteen is not, apparently. 

Sokka wheedles and begs and cajoles over the course of several days, but Hakoda doesn't budge. 

"I need you here, to look after the women and children," the Chief says just before he leaves, in response to a last ditch effort from Sokka to change the man's mind. Hakoda's eyes are locked on the sail he's rigging, determinedly avoiding looking at his son.

Sokka hears Hakoda’s words and sees them – with a feeling like a stone in his chest – for the shallow, insulting platitude that they are. 

"Tell the truth, dad," Sokka says after a long moment, hollow and dejected and offended and upset, but trying not to show it. The one thing he could always rely on was that his father didn’t lie to him. Apparently he can’t even rely on that, anymore. "None of you trust me to go." 

Because that's the crux of it, really.

It's not that he's too young – Hakoda himself was fourteen when _his_ dad took him to his first battle, and these days Sokka is a match for even the sixteen year old warriors in training, boys two years his senior. It’s not his age that’s a problem, and it’s not his skills as a warrior. It's Sokka's eyes that are the problem. 

They're eyes that reflect the soul of someone that these men are going off to fight. They're eyes that belong to the enemy. 

Sokka's heard the other men. Endured their whispers and derogatory comments for years, but they’ve increased in the days since Hakoda announced his plans to join the war.

All of them muttering about how Sokka is untrustworthy. How he would probably betray them all once he meets his soulmate – which he _obviously_ will the second they hit the front lines, Sokka thinks sarcastically, because obviously his soulmate will just be standing there on the shore, waiting for him.

The men whisper about how Sokka would probably slaughter them all in their sleep, without hesitation, if it would win the affections of his heart's echo. They whisper that none of them should turn their backs on him.

Hakoda isnt letting Sokka go, not because he’s too young or because he’s too inexperienced or because the village needs someone to guard them, but because the other men don’t trust him. Because it will be taking him too close to the enemy. It would mean taking a boy who's loyalty is – according to everyone except Sokka himself – questionable, and taking him within reach of those who he might turn on his own people for. 

"Sokka, no, that’s not – " Hakoda denies, in response to Sokka’s hollow words, and for once he actually turns to look at his son, but Sokka doesn’t want any more lies, so he’s already turned on a heel and started to leave. 

"Good luck on the front, dad," he says, walking away and speaking over his shoulder, not bothering to look back. And then, sarcastically: "I'll wait until your boats are out of sight before I signal my soulmate that the village is undefended, yeah?" 

If Hakoda says anything in response to that, Sokka doesn't hear it. 

He goes back home, gets his hunting gear, and marches inland. 

By the time he gets back home, a couple of arctic rabbit-mice swinging from his belt, his father's fleet is long gone. 

.................................................................................

Time passes, and Sokka keeps training, even though there's no one to train with and even though all the remaining villagers all still side-eye him when they think he's not looking. 

Trying to convince Sokka that he was being left behind for the sole purpose of keeping the women and children safe may have been a hollow platitude and not remotely the real reason, but the fact remains that he _is_ the only man left in the village, now. Everyone else here are either women of varying ages, or children. Sokka is the only defence these people have.

And sure, it had hurt on a soul-deep level that no one trusted him enough to let him go to war with the others, but he’s still these people’s only protection, and he’ll take that duty seriously.

So he trains by himself, and he patrols by himself – keeping an eye on the horizon for any movement at all, whether by their returning fleet or by enemy ships – and he does his best to shore up the defences around the village.

Katara, meanwhile, keeps working on her bending, even though it's entirely unreliable and she'd be better off learning how to fight with a spear and a boomerang rather than with magic water.

Sokka offers to teach her, a few months after Hakoda’s departure. He's been trying to teach the younger kids some basic defence moves (their mothers aren't happy that Sokka is the one teaching them, but he's also the only choice, so they restrict themselves to discontented mutters and make sure that all the training sessions are supervised – as though if they weren't, Sokka would start sacrificing children to the sun spirit, or something ridiculous), and he figures that Katara should join in and learn some moves too.

It's not proper, of course, for a woman to be taught to fight. But Sokka is the only warrior that the village has, and he learnt the hard way years ago that just because someone's a woman, doesn't mean she can't or won't be killed by the enemy.

Hakoda would probably be dismayed if he were to ever learn that Sokka tries to teach Katara to fight – it’s meant to be a man’s job to protect the women, after all; a woman shouldn’t _need_ to fight, because she should instead just have a man to protect her – but Hakoda isn't here, and Sokka's only one man, and if an invasion force ever comes back here, then they’re sunk. He can’t fight off a full invasion on his own. He’s good, but he’s not _that_ good.

And Sokka’s relationship with Katara might be strained, but he still loves her. And he absolutely wants her to be able to protect herself. Wants everyone in this village to be able to protect themselves, even if none of them trust him. Because despite what they all think, Sokka _is_ actually loyal to the Southern Water Tribe. It’s his home, and these are his people, and he would die to defend them if he had to.

It's a moot point, anyway. Katara refuses to learn real fighting. She insists that her water bending should be plenty capable of defending her. Sokka points out that she can't reliably do anything more than make water sway a little bit, and she gets so angry at him that when she shoves him away, she somehow manages to turn the snow below his feet to slippery ice, and he goes down in a pile of tangled limbs and weapons. She doesn't help him up.

He stops offering to teach her how to use a boomerang, after that. 

Days roll into weeks which roll into months which roll into years, until it’s been two years since Sokka’s dad took all their men and went off to war. 

During the whole two year period, there's no word from Hakoda.

So Sokka keeps on taking his duty as Village Protector seriously, even though there's nothing to defend it from, and even though none of them trust him to defend them.

..................................................................................

Sokka and Katara find a boy in an iceberg while out on a fishing trip, and everything changes. 

For starters, the scrawny kid turns out to be Katara's soulmate, and _that_ gets excruciatingly painful to be around less than three seconds after the pair of them work it out. 

"Hey, you have grey eyes," are the kid's first words upon waking up, a second after he's opened his blue (bright, bright blue – like the ocean on a sunny day) eyes, and Katara – who had been leaning over him, trying to check if he was alright – makes eye contact with him for all of a second before both of them go, “ _Oh.”_

Now – Sokka’s never seen a soulbond happen.

It’s a rare thing to see in the Southern Water Tribe, mostly because they’re such a small, close-knit community that all the soulmates within the tribe meet while they’re still children; while they’re still _toddlers,_ usually, and toddlers can’t really express what’s happening when they meet their soulmate. And also, as a general rule, toddlers are weirdly clingy and standoffish by turns, so it’s hard to tell when two of them suddenly get attached to each other whether it’s soulmate business or just basic childish clinginess.

It usually becomes evident when the two children in question maintain their close bond and prioritise each other over almost everyone else in their lives as they grow, until they’re old enough to understand the concept of soulbonds in general, and to explain to their families that yes they are indeed soulmates – or explain that no, they’re not, they’re just best friends.

(Apparently everyone thought Hakoda and Bato were soulmates when they were young, given their strong attachment to each other, but nope. Both were bonded, yes, but to Kya and Nini respectively, not to each other. Kya and Nini had initially been assumed to be soulmates too, and the four of them had been a little squad as toddlers. It had apparently caused a lot of confusion through the village, before the children grew old enough to clarify the situation.)

Those in the village who don’t bond as children usually have to travel to find their soulmate, or hope that their soulmate will come to find them. And since the Southern Water Tribe doesn’t have terribly much to offer, it’s rare that anyone from the Northern Water Tribe bothers to visit. In fact – Sokka doesn’t think there’s been a Northern visit for… nearly twenty years.

It’s part of the reason the Southern Tribe has been dwindling so terribly. Blue-eyed, un-matched men and women travel north to find their soulmate, and they never return. Why would you, if the Northern Tribe is as great as the rumours imply, while – by contrast – the Southern Tribe is practically falling into the sea?

Anyway. The point is, Sokka’s never seen a soulbond happen. Certainly never seen it happen less than a metre away from him, and _certainly_ never seen it happen to his _sister,_ whose soulmate is meant to be an _Air Nomad._

All this is why he doesn’t immediately recognise the situation for what it is as it’s happening.

The kid and Katara say a soft “ _Oh_ ,” in unison, eyes locked on one another – bright ocean blue to dusky sky grey – and then they just... stare at each other, expressions of wonder and happiness on their faces.

“Uh… _hello?”_ Sokka says, because he hasn’t worked out what’s happening yet.

They pay him no attention.

“I’m Aang,” the blue-eyed kid says, and he looks dreamy – why is he looking dreamily at Sokka’s sister. Sokka doesn’t know what’s happening, but he knows he doesn’t like it.

“Katara,” Katara responds, and she looks just as weirdly dreamy as the kid does, and _yep_ it’s time Sokka interrupted this.

“And I’m Sokka, and you were in an iceberg,” Sokka says, physically getting between the two of them and pushing Katara away from the kid, ignoring her immediate barrage of protests. “And I would like to know just what in La’s name is going on here.”

“Hi Sokka, nice to meet you,” Aang chirps, still lying on the ground, though propped up on his elbows now. Is he not cold? It looks like he’s wearing _silk._ How is he not _frozen_?

“Well, it’s not nice to meet you,” Sokka says sternly, ignoring Katara’s gasp of offence and continuing to block her efforts to get past him. “Who sent you? The Fire Nation? Are you a scout? We have a whole navy, I hope you know, so if you’re trying to take us, you’ll lose a lot of men doing it.”

“Why would the Fire Nation send me?” the kid asks, sounding genuinely baffled. “And where would they be taking you?”

That’s when Katara finally manages to shove her way past Sokka, and she goes straight to the boy (evading Sokka’s grasping hands as he tries to catch her) and holds a hand out to him.

“He’s not a Fire Nation spy, Sokka,” she says, and as usual, she’s not looking at him as she speaks to him. She’s smiling warmly down at the kid instead – the kid who beams up at her and grasps her hand and then just jumps up, not actually using Katara’s hand to pull himself up, but just holding onto it, even once he’s fully on his feet. What a weirdo. A weirdo who is _way too close to Sokka’s sister._

“We don’t know that, Katara, get away from him – ” Sokka starts to say, but Katara cuts him off.

“He’s not a spy,” she says, insistent and not looking away from the boy. “He’s my _soulmate.”_

And _that_ – that brings Sokka up short.

Katara’s _soulmate?_

“Hi,” the kid chirps again, cheerful and chipper and holding Katara’s hand and not flinching at the cold even though his clothes are made of freaking _silk,_ and Sokka just… stares, shocked.

……………………………………………………………..

The weird thing about this kid – no. The _second_ thing that’s weird about this kid – actually, you know what? It’s not even the second thing. There’s three distinct things that are weird about this kid that come first.

The first is that he’s Katara’s soulmate, apparently – and boy is _that_ going to take some getting used to, that Katara has a _soulmate_ now. The second is that he came out of an iceberg; the third is that he’s an _Airbender_ , which is weird only because, oh, _all the Airbenders were wiped out a century ago._ You know. No big deal.

Anyway.

The fourth weird thing about this kid is that he doesn’t seem to mind Sokka’s eye colour.

Like. At all.

He is, in fact, delighted by it.

"You know – the monks saw it as a blessing if all the children from one family had another nation's soul eyes," Aang says, once he realises that Sokka and Katara are siblings and that neither of them have their own nation’s colour. _Soul eyes_ is a term Sokka's never heard before, and he wonders if it’s an air nomad thing. 

(Where have the Nomads been hiding, anyway, is what Sokka would like to know. Cause there’s no doubt that the kid is an airbender – he leapt twenty feet in the air while they were all still on the iceberg, and he has a weird giant bison _,_ which Sokka and Katara are currently sitting on top of as it swims them back to their village. So that means that there’s been Nomads this whole time, and that they’ve stayed hidden. Like _cowards,_ Sokka thinks viciously, but doesn’t say.)

"It was a sign that that family would prosper, and would spread out far across the lands," the kid goes on, thoroughly unaware of Sokka’s thoughts. "Migration is good – it's why the Air Nomads have different temples in the four corners of the world." 

"Yeah, well, good for the Air Nomads," Sokka grumbles. "Load of good it did them." 

Katara elbows him in the ribs, hard. 

“Have you met your soulmate yet?” the kid goes on, and he’s sitting really close to Katara and he’s making unflinching eye-contact with Sokka, and it’s all making Sokka wildly uncomfortable. No one’s looked him in the eyes for longer than a second since his mother died, and it’s utterly unnerving him, the way the kid keeps making and then _keeping_ eye contact with him.

Weird thing number five about this kid. Bizarrely enthusiastic eye-contact.

“No,” Sokka says shortly, looking away – choosing to look over the edge of the saddle and watch the sun glinting off the water below, instead of enduring any more weirdly attentive eye-contact from the strange child.

“I’m sure you’ll meet them soon,” Aang says, encouraging, as though that’s a _good thing,_ and Sokka looks back at the kid with an incredulous expression.

“The monks always say it will happen when you least expect it,” the kid chirps, misinterpreting Sokka’s expression, apparently, and seeming to be blissfully unaware of the way Katara’s sitting stiffly next to him, uncomfortable with the turn the conversation has taken.

“Why would I _want_ to meet my soulmate?” Sokka demands, harsh, and the kid blinks, startled by the sudden anger. Sokka goes on, gesturing furiously at his own eyes. “You do realise what colour these are, yeah? You know what they _mean?”_

“Uh,” Aang says, floundering, and apparently unsure of what he’s done to set Sokka off like this. “That your soulmate is Fire Na – ”

“ _Fire Nation,_ exactly,” Sokka snarls, interrupting. “So why in La’s name would I want to meet someone from somewhere as evil as the _Fire Nation?”_

The kid looks even more confused, and somewhat concerned, too.

“Evil?” Aang echoes, glancing at Katara as though she might shed some light on the situation. Her lips are pressed tightly together and she’s looking over the railing, watching the ocean below much like Sokka had been not long ago.

“The Fire Nation aren’t evil, they’re just diff– ” the Airbender says, but Sokka cuts him off again, this time with a harsh wheeze of disbelief.

“Not evil?” he demands, unable to believe what he’s hearing. “Tell that to all the people they’ve murdered.”

The kid might not have Fire Nation blood, but what, was he raised by them? Why else would he be defending them? Oh, Tui, Katara’s bonded to a Fire Nation sympathiser. Is that worse or better than being soul-destined for a Fire Nation native, Sokka wonders wildly.

“People they’ve killed?” Aang asks, alarmed. “What do you mean? Who have they killed?” 

Katara pulls her gaze back from the ocean below to stare in astonishment at her soulmate, her expression of disbelief a perfect match to Sokka’s.

“Who have they killed?” Sokka asks, hoarse, and trying desperately not to think of the last time he saw his mother. She’d waved him out of the igloo and told him to go play with his sister. Sokka’s mother was _murdered_ while he was _playing in the snow_ like an idiot _child_.

“Where have you been the last hundred years, under a rock?” he asks the kid, tone harsh and grating painfully in his throat.

“The war?” Katara asks, taking over and looking at her soulmate with an expression that’s half encouraging and half expectant. “It’s in its hundredth year now? The Fire Nation has been trying to take over the other Nations for decades? Our father is off fighting them now.”

Aang is staring at her, shocked and uncomprehending.

“No,” he eventually says. “No, there must be some misunderstanding. I visited my friend there just last year, and everything was fine. There was no war happening – and certainly not one that’s gone on for a hundred years. There must be some mistake.”

Katara turns from the kid to swap a fleeting look with Sokka. She only locks eyes with him for a heartbeat before she looks away again, but Sokka reads the disbelief and the worry and the confusion and a miriad of other emotions in her face.

Well, Sokka thinks. Make that six weird things about this kid.

…………………………………………………………………………………

The black snow starts to fall just after lunchtime, and it’s all of Sokka’s worst nightmares come true.

They’d arrived back at the village on Aang’s bison (Apon? Appet? Appa? Yeah, that was it), and both the giant animal and the silk-clad boy upon it were greeted with curiosity to start with, and then with enthusiasm once Katara explained that she’d found her soulmate.

No one asks where he came from – no one wonders where the Nomads have been hiding out this last century. No one questions the situation at all; they all just assume that Aang travelled to meet his soulmate and found her, and there’s a very resentful part of Sokka – who’s never been able to do so much as go fishing without being eyed with suspicion from these people – that notes bitterly that apparently an unaccompanied Airbender child who appears out of the snow on an almost-extinct animal is worthy of more automatic trust than Sokka is, even though Sokka is as Water Tribe as you can get and has done all he can think of over the years to prove his loyalty and trustworthiness.

The villagers welcome the strange child with open arms, and there’s an impromptu feast thrown together in his and Katara’s honour. Aang entertains the young children and the mothers alike with frivolous little airbending tricks, and Katara beams happily every time someone congratulates her on her brand new match.

Sokka watches everything with suspicious eyes, not remotely trusting this _Aang_ kid just yet – not when there’s so many questions that are still unanswered about him – and even if the fermented sealmilk had been passed to him (it wasn’t), he wouldn’t have drunk any. He wants to keep his wits about him until he knows they’re not at risk, and right now, he couldn’t be any less sure.

Katara blushes a lot and can’t seem to stop smiling, and her hand remains clasped with Aang’s the impromptu meal, and the two of them keep catching each other’s eyes and then just… staring at each other, goofy grins on both of their faces.

She looks radiantly happy – content in a way Sokka’s never seen her, and there’s a part of him that’s glad she’s found such contentment even as the rest of him remains suspicious and watchful of this mysterious stranger.

After the late breakfast feast, Aang asks Katara to go penguin sledding with him, which is something Sokka’s never even heard of, and he immediately says no, absolutely not, no way – but Gran Gran stops him with a hand on his arm.

“He’s her soulmate,” she says, directing her words to Sokka but not looking at him, as per usual. “We can trust him.”

Because, again – the weird Airbender kid from the middle of an iceberg is more trustworthy in the eyes of this village than Sokka is, apparently. Sokka clenches his teeth and swallows the ball of hurt.

So Katara and Aang go off to go “penguin sledding,” whatever that is, and Sokka settles in by the communal fire to sharpen his boomerang, determined to wait right here until his sister is safely returned to the village.

It’s not even an hour later that there’s a sudden bang that echoes across the landscape, startling everyone in the vicinity, and Sokka looks up in alarm to see a bright light shooting up into the sky, and his stomach sinks like a stone as a sudden rush of horror and fury floods through him.

“I _knew_ we couldn’t trust him!” he snarls, leaping to his feet, because he might not have ever seen one in action, but he’s heard about Fire Nation flares from his father and Bato and he can recognise one on-sight, and he also knows all about how they’re used to signal to other Fire Nation soldiers.

He races to his and Katara and Gran Gran’s igloo to snatch up his club-sword, and runs back outside again as soon as he has it, intent on running non-stop to that old beached warship that Sokka guesses is where the flare was just fired from. If he finds the ship, he’ll find the boy on it that just sent out a signal to the Fire Nation. And if Sokka finds the kid, he’ll find his sister, and if he can find his sister, then he can keep her safe from whatever evil plans the Airbender is trying to pull.

Sokka goes to race out of the village, but doesn’t even make it to the perimeter before there’s a swooping shadow overhead, and then the Airbender lands, using some strange little contraption that apparently helps him fly. The kid lands a little heavier than he probably usually would, given that he’s got Katara clinging to him like an arctic spidermonkey.

Sokka’s immediately torn between rage that this little traitorous air brat has enjoyed their hospitality and then immediately _turned on them_ and signalled their enemy, and a sort of terrified fury that his _sister_ was just flying through the air on some flimsy Air Nomad device with nothing holding her up there except her grip on her _traitor_ of a soulmate.

“I’m ok!” Katara calls immediately to the crowd that’s already started to assemble, instinctively making use of the rage that’s momentarily blocked Sokka’s ability to speak and getting in before he can make his vocal chords kick back in. “It’s ok – it was just some old booby trap on that old warship.”

“A _booby trap – ”_ Sokka splutters, furious. “On the _warship –_ Katara! What were you doing on the warship in the first place?!”

“Aang wanted to see it,” she explains. The light from the flare is still trailing through the mid-morning sky. “He’d never seen one before.”

Sokka opens his mouth to say _Well lucky him_ or some other biting comment, and is fully planning on questioning the hell out of the kid (because Katara clearly thinks that it was an accident, setting off the flare, but Sokka has doubts and he’s not going to rest until he’s got _answers)_ but that’s when the first fleck of dark grey ‘snow’ floats down out of the sky.

Sokka sees it and does a double-take, staring at it with dawning horror blended with a desperate, wild hope that maybe he’s just seeing things – maybe it’s something else, maybe it’s just a fleck of ash from the communal fire, Tui, _please_ let it be anything else –

He looks up, and the sky is full of a thin scattering of black snow.

Ice floods his veins and he feels the blood drain from his face.

He’s not the only one to notice. 

“What did you _do?”_ Kani demands, her face pale but her eyes flinty with anger and suspicion as she glares at Sokka. She’s never liked him – well. _None_ of the villagers like him, but Kani has always been one of the most vocal in her hatred and distrust of him, and her face is full of both those emotions as she glares at him through the slowly descending flecks of black snow.

“Me!?” Sokka yelps, outraged. “I didn’t do anything! I was sitting right here!”

She’s not the only one looking at him with anger and suspicion. Sokka sees Kani’s expression echoed on the faces of those around her – the other mothers and old women who are scattered through what passes for their village’s main square.

Sokka can’t _believe_ this. He was sitting in plain view, the whole time, but they think he’s done this?

“How?” he demands, gesturing angrily at the sky, where the black snow is still only thin, but is slowly getting thicker. “How could I have done this, when I was sitting literally right there? I was never even out of your sight!”

“Maybe you and the Airbender are working together,” Kani accuses, pointing at Aang, who looks startled and confused. “Working together to bring the Fire Nation down on our heads!”

“Hey! That’s my _soulmate_ you’re talking about,” Katara snaps, stepping half in front of Aang and glaring at Kani. She defends the airbender, Sokka notices, a hint of bitterness blooming on the back of his tongue. But she doesn’t say anything about the accusations being thrown at _Sokka_.

“Well maybe you’re in on it too,” Kani yells, her panic and anger at the sudden arrival of black snow starting to give way to a furious hysteria. “You’re the flame-lover’s sister, after all! One rotten fish turns the whole barrel bad!”

“Maybe we should all calm down,” Aang says, wading into the verbal battle and intervening before Katara – who’s bristling with rage, now – can say anything. “I don’t really know what any of you are talking about, but if it’s about the flare, that was all me. Katara and Sokka didn’t have anything to do with it. I set it off by accident.”

_He_ includes Sokka in his defence, Sokka notes with a detached curiosity. Katara only defended Aang, when she spoke, but Aang is defending her and Sokka both. Sokka… doesn’t know what to make of that. 

“Oh, the stranger says he did it by _accident,_ I guess we should all just _believe him_ ,” Kani snarls, as though she wasn’t one of the women who’d warmly welcomed Katara’s new-found soulmate just a few hours ago. 

“Look,” Sokka says, cutting in before this can devolve further. “We don’t have _time_ for this. We all know what the black snow means. We need to prepare! Warriors, fetch your weapons, and – ”

“Why should we listen to anything you have to say?” Kani demands, shrill. “You’re the one who did this! I know it!”

“I _didn’t_ ,” Sokka snaps, furious. “But we don’t have time to argue! Do what you want, Kani – take your family and some supplies and flee inland, if you want to, but I need _someone_ to help me shore up defences and I need _someone_ who’s willing to stand with me and fight. Hopefully their ships will just pass us by, but if they don’t, we can’t have spent the little time we have arguing when we _should_ be getting ready!”

“I’ll help,” Aang says, stepping forward, a resolved expression on his young face, and Sokka looks at him in surprise.

“I don’t know exactly what’s happening, but if someone’s coming to attack you, I’ll help you fight them,” he continues, firm. “Katara’s my soulmate and you’re her people, so I’ll help protect you all.”

“I’ll fight too,” Katara says, stepping forward and reaching for Aang’s hand, and that shakes Sokka out of his surprised silence.

“No,” he says, shaking his head. She doesn’t know anything about weapons, and she can’t rely on her waterbending, untrained as it is, and Sokka wants her nowhere near the coming fight. “No – I don’t want you anywhere near them, Katara – ”

“You’re fighting, and my _soulmate_ is fighting, and I _won’t_ flee inland like a _coward_ ,” she snaps, cutting him off and glaring at his shoulder. “And we don’t have time to argue about it, so don’t bother.”

She’s got a point about the time restraints, Sokka realises, and he snarls in frustration. Fleeing inland wouldn’t be _cowardly,_ he wants to argue. It’s _smart._ It’s the only thing that might keep her _safe._ But she’s right. They don’t have time to argue, and Sokka knows his sister well enough to know that even if they had hours to debate the issue, it wouldn’t matter. She’s made her mind up. Sokka would have more luck trying to turn an iceberg around than he’ll have trying to get Katara to change her mind.

“Fine,” he concedes, furious. “But if we survive this, I’m going to yell at you for an entire week for putting yourself in danger.”

He turns to the scattered women and children, then, half of whom look terrified and half of whom are glaring at him mistrustfully. The crowd has grown since the flare first went off. Sokka’s pretty sure that everyone in the village is here now, huddling together and clutching their children close.

“Ok,” he says to all of them, raising his voice. “Warriors – fetch your weapons and your armour and meet back here in no more than ten minutes. Anyone who can help with the defences, start on the shoreline and move out from there. We want to make the wall as thick as we can as quickly as we can. Anyone who’s fleeing inland, do it quickly. We don’t know how long we have and the further away you can get, the safer you’ll be.”

“If the traitor thinks we should flee, then I think we should do the opposite,” Kani says, voice loud and cold and distrustful, and Sokka wants to scream.

“Warriors – go,” he says instead, turning away from her and focusing on what he _can_ change. He can’t get Kani to stop being an idiot, but he can marshal what little defences they have.

Not as many of the young boys go to fetch their things as Sokka hoped. To their credit, most of them go to get ready initially, but at least half of their mothers hold them back and whisper to them sternly to stay put, and the boys don’t argue.

It’s not because he’s the one in charge, Sokka tells himself determinedly, even though he knows full well that that’s _exactly_ why the mothers are holding their sons back.

He _wants_ to believe that it’s just that the women don’t want their young sons fighting Fire Nation soldiers, but he knows that’s not the main reason. If _Hakoda_ had been here and asked for the children to ready their weapons, none of these mothers would have protested. Wept, yes, out of fear and pre-emptive grief, but not argued. Not held their children back.

Still. _Some_ of the boys go to fetch their weapons, and some of the women come forward to help shore up the defences. That’s as good as he’s going to get, so Sokka gets to work and determinedly ignores the women who gather their children close and huddle together in a worried, suspicious cluster to watch everyone else get the village ready for battle.

Sokka sets the volunteers to carting snow from the borders of the village and gets them to start packing it up against the sea-front wall, reinforcing the point that attack is most likely to come from, and once they’re all working steadily, he goes to get ready himself.

It doesn’t take him long, and by the time he steps out, his face is painted in the traditional black, grey, and white Warrior Mask, and he’s got all his weapons either in hand or sheathed and hanging from his belt. His club-sword is in his right hand, his boomerang is in easy reach against his right hip. He’s got a sheathed hunting knife hanging from his left hip, and he’s got a boning-knife tucked into his boot. That last one isn’t a traditional weapon, but it’s just as sharp as the hunting blade, and he figures that he’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

By the time he steps out, the younger warriors have started gathering where he told them to, and Aang and Katara have started to help with the wall reinforcements. Aang is using gusts of air to blast piles of snow towards the wall, and once it’s there, Katara is trying her best (but failing more than succeeding) to turn the loose snow into hard packed ice. The volunteer women are carting snow in smaller piles, but all of them are working studiously.

They seem to have it under control for now, so Sokka turns his attention to the young warriors.

The black snow is swirling thicker, now. There were only occasional motes drifting down, earlier, but they’ve been getting more and more dense since then, and they’re starting to create a light grey blanket on the ground.

The young warriors (kids, Tui, they’re just _kids –_ they’re all _so young;_ the oldest amongst them isn’t even _ten)_ are a sloppy looking group.

Their weapons are absurdly huge in their small hands, and their warrior paint is unevenly applied and smudged.

They’re so _young._

Sokka wants nothing more than to tell them to go back to their mothers – tell them to put their weapons away and hide behind the furs of adults who will protect them, _shield_ them from the horrors of life for just a little bit longer.

But he can’t. He’s got no one else who can fight. Aang is an unknown entity – sure, he looks like he’s got a pretty good grasp on airbending, but what’s the kid like in a fight? Sokka has no idea – and Katara _definitely_ doesn’t know her way around a fight. Her bending isn’t remotely reliable, and she has zero combat experience. He can’t rely on her holding her own in a minor scuffle, much less a life and death fight.

So yeah, the kids are way too young and way too inexperienced for this, but Sokka has no other choice.

Although…

Maybe he can keep them away from the thick of things a little bit.

It’s not smart – from a strategic point of view, Sokka should use everyone that he can and not spare anyone just because he’s having an attack of sentiment – but he looks at these kids, these _children,_ and he can’t help himself.

If he lines them up in front of Fire Nation soldiers, they’re all going to die. But maybe there’s an alternative. 

“Ok, warriors!” he says to them all, stern and channelling his father. “Today’s the day you prove yourselves. Now! We’re only a small number of fighters, so we’re gonna have to be clever about this. We’re going to have to use _strategy._ The enemy is gonna come at us all at once, and there aren’t that many of us, so we need to trick them. We need them to think there’s less of us than there really are. So I want you all to lay in wait, ok?”

Their big blue eyes all stare up at him, fear and nerves stark on their little faces.

“I want you to hide behind the igloos, and if the Fire Nation soldiers go to attack your mothers and aunts, _that’s_ when you attack. But no earlier, got it? And remember – you’re all much smaller than the enemy men, so go low with your attacks. Calves, ankles, up under their armour and into their bellies. You got it?”

There’s a smattering of nods.

“Good. Ok – into position!! Don’t all hide in one spot – spread out! And make sure you’re out of sight. And _only_ attack if the enemy is about to attack your mothers, got it? Good. Go.”

The children scatter, some of them rushing back to their mothers and vanishing behind their furs, and some of them hurrying to find hiding spots behind the igloos.

It’s not ideal, but it might save some of them. If the Fire Nation came upon a bunch of six-to-ten year old boys standing in a line and holding weapons, none of the children would walk away alive. But if they’re hiding, and they only attack when their mothers are threatened…. Well. The village is still likely to see some significant loss, if the enemy soldiers land here, but at least it won’t be their _entire_ next generation of fighters. If just a few of them survive, then that’s better than none of them surviving. And who knows? If the enemy isn’t expecting a small child with a blade to stick them through the gut, then maybe the kids will even manage to get some kills in. They stand a better chance using the element of surprise than they would if they were standing in a row.

Right. Children as protected as he can make them, that just leaves Katara. Now this – this requires a delicate touch.

Sokka turns and spots the Airbender kid (his mind still boggles at that – an _airbender_ kid; the Sokka of this morning did _not_ forsee his day having an actual Airbender in it, that’s for sure, and if they survive this, Sokka is going to pick Aang’s brain for everything he has on the Nomad hide-outs that have helped them survive the last hundred years), and Aang is standing in front of the sea-wall and is in the middle of creating another gust that picks up the soft snow in a flurry, and is directing it to the wall’s base.

And beyond Aang, in the distance, Sokka spots a small, dark spot on the horizon. Ice floods his stomach and he feels the blood drain from his face.

It’s the Fire Nation ship, and it’s pointed right at them.

Well there goes the vague hope that they were just going to sail by.

Sokka makes his way over to Aang and waits until the kid has finished dumping his latest gust of powdery snow at the foot of the wall. Katara, several metres away, immediately starts trying to turn it to ice, and she seems to have worked out that if she does it backwards – gestures sharply behind her – that she can manage to create an icy stripe. Sokka ignores her and goes straight to Aang, because this requires strategy.

“I want you to hide,” Sokka says urgently, his eyes locked on the rapidly approaching ship but his words directed at Aang, who looks at him quizzically.

“They won’t be expecting an airbender,” Sokka explains, even though that’s only part of his reasoning. The part that he doesn’t say is that wherever this kid is, Katara is likely to be there too. And if Katara is hiding with her soulmate, even if only for a little while, then she’s going to be safer than she would be if she were on the front line with Sokka. It’s the same kind of strategy as he’s employing with the children. Keep them away from the fight for as long as possible, and hope that that plus the element of surprise might give them enough of an edge that they survive. But he’s not going to tell Aang – or Katara – that.

“Hide to start with, until we know how many of them there are and what they want,” Sokka says. “And then wait for an opportune moment, and swoop in and take them by surprise. Don’t just fly in when I start fighting them. They probably won’t all be out of their ship yet before I engage. Wait until they’re all out – until we know how many there are, and then try to blow them all back into the water. Go now, before they get close enough to see you. They might have spy-glasses, so don’t use anymore bending for now.”

It’s a plan that has potential, as well as one that protects Katara. Win-win.

Out the corner of his eye, Sokka sees Aang’s face take on an expression of understanding.

“Sure thing, Strategy Man,” the kid says, and makes to leave, but Sokka reaches out and catches his sleeve before he can.

“Aang,” Sokka says, low and serious, pulling his gaze from the horizon and looking at the kid’s collarbone instead, and Aang turns to him expectantly. “If I die, get Katara, and get out.”

Aang blinks, shock and dismay flooding his face at Sokka’s words.

“Take her to wherever the Nomads are hiding,” Sokka goes on, because wherever they’ve been hiding must be a well-protected spot, if they’ve managed to hide from the whole world for the last hundred years. Sokka was mad about that, before – they could have helped with the war effort, instead of hiding like cowards – but now, if it means that Katara has somewhere safe to go to, he’s relived. “Take her there, and look after her. Keep her safe.”

Aang turns to face him fully, looking him in the eyes without flinching.

“I will,” the kid says, and then his face lightens. “I won’t need to, though. We’re all gonna be fine. I’m sure this is just a big misunderstanding.”

With that, he pops open his weird kite thing and leaps into the air, flying off in Katara’s direction and leaving Sokka standing in his wake with a slack jaw.

Tui, Sokka thinks. This kid is dangerously naive. He truly has no idea about the state of the world, does he?

Because Sokka’s not going to lie to himself. There’s no way they’re “all gonna be fine.” In fact, Sokka doesn’t see any way of him getting out of this situation alive. He said _if I die_ to Aang, but really, he knows it’s just a matter of time. He’s one guy facing off against an invading army. His only hope is that he can take a decent number of them out before they take him down.

Because he doesn’t know why this Fire Nation ship is coming, but he knows that it’s not to start up a trade route with the Southern Water Tribe.

No – whatever they’re coming for, it’s nothing good. Maybe it’s to steal their women, like has been done in the past. Maybe it’s to steal their supplies, which is as good as a death sentence in these parts. Maybe it’s to eradicate them entirely, like they tried to do to the airbenders; to smash their home to pieces and to kill them all and to claim the Southern Waters as their own by right of conquest.

Whatever it is, Sokka knows he’s not going to let them get away with it without a fight. And he also knows that Fire Nation soldiers don’t _like_ people fighting them. When they came last time – last time, you know, when they _killed Sokka’s mother_ – they also killed eleven of the warriors. Seven Water Tribe men were dead by the end of the battle, and then another four had succumbed to their wounds (burns, mostly) over the next few days.

And sure, the Water Tribe warriors fought the invaders off, that time, but at the cost of eleven warrior’s lives. At the cost of _Kya’s_ life. And that’s not even mentioning the three other women who were dragged onto the warship – kicking, screaming, and biting, but unable to wrestle their way free. Women who haven’t been heard from since.

(Bato and the other men had given chase to the warship that kidnapped the women, Sokka remembers. Bato’s soulmate Nini had been one of the women. But the wind hadn’t been in the Water Tribe’s favour, and the engine-powered warships had outpaced the Tribe’s wooden ships easily, and Bato and the others had returned home three weeks later, dejected and furious and empty handed and heartbroken.)

And that was when the village had more than just Sokka defending it. That was when they had over sixty men who took up arms and threw themselves fearlessly into the village’s defence. Even then, they still lost fifteen people.

And this time around, there’s only Sokka.

Well. Ok, to be fair, that’s not _quite_ true.

There’s Sokka, and Katara (who doesn’t know how to fight), and a bunch of green children who’s weapons are bigger than they are, and an airbender kid who Sokka met this morning. That’s it.

Against an entire warship full of Fire Nation soldiers.

So yeah. Sokka doesn’t see any way that this fight ends with him still in possession of his own life.

There’s a cold resolve in his chest at the thought.

He doesn’t let any of this show on his face, though, and he simply watches as Aang darts over to Katara and explains the plan to her.

Katara – as Sokka hoped she would – takes Aang’s hand and leads him away from the wall and back towards the village. Sokka thinks he knows exactly where they’re going to hide. There’s an igloo built on the edge of a slight rise, and if you hunker down behind it, you can see out over the village while being mostly out of sight yourself. It’s a good vantage point.

Katara leads Aang away and doesn’t glance back at Sokka, who tries not to think about the fact that this is probably going to be the last time he’ll ever see his sister. She weaves her way through the clustered women – Kani has apparently decided not to flee, but not to hide in an igloo either, and she’s standing next to the communal fire with her son peeking out from behind her, and she’s watching Sokka’s every move with a suspicious expression.

The women who were helping shore up the wall take Aang and Katara’s departure as a cue, and they scatter too. Some of them move to join Kani, others gather their things and go to find hiding places.

Some of the women have taken their children and hidden inside their igloos (as though the meagre ice-walls will protect them from invading soldiers) but if anyone decided to flee inland then Sokka didn’t see them leave. He hopes some of them did. Inland is the safest place any of them can be, right now. The further inland they are, the farther away they are from the incoming soldiers.

_Ok then_ , Sokka thinks, surveying the village shrewdly, looking for any last minute defences that can be erected, and spotting nothing. _So this is it._

There’s nothing more Sokka can do for the Tribe now except defend them. It’s too late for them to run; the incoming ship is making horrifically fast time and has already covered half the distance from when Sokka first spotted it. Anyone who tries to flee now will likely just be chased down, and might even lead the soldiers to the tracks of anyone who fled earlier.

Sokka turns away from the clustered women, aware of Kani’s mistrustful gaze on his back, and hurries over to the watch tower he painstakingly built over a year ago. The tower itself isn’t sturdy enough for Sokka to stand on it, so he stands on the wall beside it instead, his back to his people and his village as he watches the threat coming ever closer and closer.

He’s alone, now – with Katara and Aang lying in wait, the child-warriors hiding, the women clustered together as though proximity to each other will protect them from the incoming danger – and isn’t that kind of poetic? That he’s alone? He’s been alone for years – shunted to the side by his own village since he was a child – and now here he is, facing down certain death in defence of that village, and he’s doing it by himself. There’s a poetic irony somewhere in there, Sokka’s certain.

The children he’s been training are huddled in little groups back near the huts, and their tiny bodies are probably trembling with fear as they grip their weapons nervously. Their painted faces really are all sloppy disasters. If Sokka weren’t so sure he’s about to die, he’d make a mental note to lecture them all later about the importance of presentation, and make them practice applying their warpaint until they can all do it in the dark. But he’s not going to get the chance to do that, so he lets it go.

Gran Gran is back there somewhere, too – she’s with Kani and the other women by the fire, but Sokka would like to think that she’s watching him with concern, and not suspicion. Tui, he hopes she doesn’t think he had anything to with this. He doesn’t have time to check. He hopes she’ll be ok. She’s old, so she’s unlikely to be of interest to the invaders. But at the same time… she’s old, so she’s frail and vulnerable. He wishes that she’d fled inland, but it’s too late now. Sokka’s just gonna have to hope for the best for her.

The ship is closer, now, and getting even closer by the second. Sokka can make out the pattern on the flag, and can see the deliberately crafted holes in the hull that firebenders use to shoot flaming attacks out of.

Sokka moves slightly to the left on top of the wall so that he’s directly in the ship’s path, and he plants his feet and stands as tall as he can, face set in stone as he watches the enemy warship plough closer and closer.

Will anyone mourn him when he dies, Sokka wonders.

Gran Gran and Katara might. They probably will, to be fair. But they won’t grieve him the same way they would grieve each other, or the way they would for Hakoda. Any love and fondness they feel for Sokka is weighed down and tainted by the conflicting emotions they feel about the fact that the match to Sokka’s soul is an evil, fire-loving villain. So they’ll grieve, but probably not too badly.

And they’ll be the only ones.

The other women won’t mourn him. Neither will the warriors, if they ever return. Hakoda will probably just be relieved that there’s no longer a succession crisis. This way, he can hand the Chiefdom over to Katara with no issues, instead of having to choose between overlooking his firstborn son and heir, or giving the Chief’s title to a guy who the whole village hates because his soulmate is one of their sworn enemies.

Anyway. It’s fine. Sokka never expected the Chieftancy to pass to him anyway, but this makes it easier for everyone, as well as saving him the embarrassment of being passed over.

He’s never been loved by this village, and he’s come to realise – slowly, subconsciously – that he’s never _going_ to be loved by them.

The best he can hope for is that by dying this way – by going down fighting, protecting his village, fighting against the very people his soul’s match belongs to – that they’ll finally see that he was never a traitor. That his loyalty was only ever to the Water Tribe. That the colour of his eyes meant nothing.

All he can hope for is that he’ll be remembered as a guy who had the eyes of the enemy but the heart of a Water Tribe Warrior. Remembered as a hero.

He doesn’t even know if that will be the case.

Maybe he’ll die today and all they’ll say is _good riddance,_ or _lucky he got killed before he could betray us all_ or _thank Tui that we don’t have to keep watching him for treachery anymore,_ or maybe even _well that’s one less mouth to feed._

But he’ll have done his best. He can walk into the Spirit World with his head held high knowing that he did everything he possibly could to keep his tribe safe.

It’s a cold, hollow feeling, knowing that you’re about to die.

But Sokka faces the knowledge just as he’s facing the on-coming ship.

Fearlessly.

……………………………………………………………………………………………..

The ship crashes right into the village wall.

Sokka holds his place on the wall until the last possible moment – weapons at the ready and a determined expression on his face – but he has to dive aside a second before the ship strikes.

He dives and rolls, and behind him the enemy warship ploughs through the built up ice and snow like a hot knife through seal-fat, and when it finally comes to a stop, it’s only metres away from the closest igloo. The women are a flurry of startled shrieks and terrified cries as they scatter backwards to keep from being run over.

Sokka scrambles to his feet as quickly as he can, circling in a wide berth so he can keep to the largest sheets of ice and avoid falling into the churning water below (it’s times like these that Sokka _hates_ that their village is built on an iceshelf), and by the time he gets around to the front of the ship, the gangplank is already starting to come down.

Sokka wastes no time, and the second the gangplank is low enough for him to manage it, he hollers a warcry as he makes a running leap and lands, feet slapping down hard on the still-descending metal, in front of the first wave of soldiers.

There’s at least twenty of them, all clad in their stupid pointy uniforms and standing ready to disembark, and as soon as Sokka lands on the gangplank, they all shift into fighting stances.

There’s one man standing slightly ahead of all the rest, and he regards the village behind Sokka with what looks – at this distance – to be cold disinterest. He’s wearing a helmet, like the rest of the soldiers are, but his has no mask over his face, one side of which is scarred quite badly – and actually, his uniform looks different to theirs too.

The leader, Sokka infers. He’ll go for that one first.

The gangplank finishes its descent below Sokka’s feet, hitting the ice with a shuddering clang, and Sokka’s hand reaches for his boomerang.

“You aren’t welcome here,” he says to the men, aiming for his father’s deepest, most commanding tone. “Leave.”

“Not until we get what we came for,” the one in front says, sounding surprisingly young.

“You’re not going to take _anything,”_ Sokka snarls, and throws his boomerang.

The leader leans slightly sideways and the weapon sails past without making contact, but Sokka doesn’t hesitate – just throws himself forward, following the boomerang’s path, and swings his sword-club, aiming for the guy’s knees. Can’t invade a village if your knees have been smashed in, after all.

The guy jumps into the air to avoid Sokka’s swing, and punches at the air as he does, and Sokka has to twist sideways in order to avoid the blast of fire that nearly strikes him in the ribs.

Sokka follows his own momentum and darts sideways and backward a few steps until he’s completely out of range, because the timing should be about right for – ah, yep, there it is. 

The firebender doesn’t see the glint in the sky that heralds the boomerang’s return, so the guy gets no warning before it cracks him hard in the back of the head. Sokka attacks in the same instant, swinging hard at the leader’s ribs this time.

He gets a strike in, and the firebender snarls in pain as Sokka’s club slams him in the side of the chest, but then he retaliates with a sweep of his foot, and Sokka has to jump to avoid the circle of fire that blooms out, which means he is momentarily distracted, which means the enemy man is able to grab Sokka’s club at the upper end of the handle.

He tries to pull it from Sokka’s grasp, but Sokka isn’t about to let his weapon go _quite_ that easily, so he holds on tight, and both of them trying to yank the club out of each other’s grasp means that they wind up chest to chest, and Sokka looks up, a furious snarl twisting his lips, to finally look his enemy in the face.

And the world stops. 

Because the invading man is looking right back at him, and he has _blue eyes_ – dark, deep blue like the ocean in wintertime – and the second Sokka locks eyes with him, he feels a rush of warmth through his chest, and feels something slot into place inside him that he didn’t even know was missing.

It feels like the first gulp of a warm drink after hours spent out hunting in the cold. It feels like the toasty, comforting warmth of a cooking fire. It feels like the first rays of the sun hitting his face after a long, dark winter.

It feels like how everyone always described it would feel, in all the stories that have ever been told of soulmates.

It feels like coming home.

And it’s the feeling that Sokka has hoped – for as long as he can remember – to never, ever experience.

_“You,”_ Sokka and the other man – the other _teen_ – gasp in tandem, both of them in tones of shock and dismay and burgeoning anger, and they stumble back from one another as though stung, the club-sword clattering abandoned to the gangplank between them.

Weird that the other boy is reacting the same way Sokka is, a distant part of his brain thinks. Most people are overjoyed to meet their soulmate. People don’t tend to pull _away_ from them. Sokka is the exception, of course. Sokka’s reacting like this because his soulmate is an evil dirty firebender who’s invading Sokka’s village. Who would want to be soulbonded to _that_?

But he doesn’t understand why the other teen is pulling away too, a look of anger on his face that mirrors Sokka’s own. What’s this guy got to be upset about? There’s nothing wrong with being bonded to someone from the Water Tribes. Not like there is being bonded to a _sunchild,_ for Tui’s sake _._ This random guy is the one who got the better end of the deal, here, no question, but by his tone of voice and the expression on his face, it seems that he’s as disgusted by this situation as Sokka is. He looks even more outraged than Sokka does, actually – the scar on the side of his face makes his already-disgusted expression even more fierce.

_Fantastic_ , Sokka thinks wildly. _Hasn’t even properly met me yet, but even my soulmate hates me. That’s got to be a first._

But hey, it’s not like he doesn’t hate his soulmate right back.

And anyway. This changes nothing. These people are still here to harm his village – to hurt his people – and Sokka’s not going to let that happen.

And yeah, he’ll fight his own soulmate if he has to.

Sokka pulls a mask up over whatever expression is on his face, settles into a fighting stance, and glares. The firebender has pulled his own startled expression under control and is glaring right back, blue eyes locked on orange, and the warmth in Sokka’s chest is still lingering in a manner that is pleasant and yet decidedly unwanted, and he knows it’s because they’re still looking at each other, but Sokka refuses to pull his gaze away this time. Normally he would, but normally he’s not fighting for his village’s life.

“Get out of my village,” he orders, voice hard.

“Gladly,” the blue-eyed Fire Nation soldier sneers, disgust and derision in every plane of his face. “Hand over the Avatar, and I’ll go, and never come back.”

That brings Sokka up short.

“The Avatar?” he asks, straightening out of his fighting stance in surprise. “That’s why you’re here?”

“Why else would I come to a place like this?” the teen asks, contemptuous and vicious.

“You… realise there _is_ no Avatar, right?” Sokka says, one eyebrow raised in baffled derision. “Like, that’s a whole thing. Missing for a hundred years, no sign of him…. I mean. You know all that, right?”

“I _know_ he’s here,” Blue-Eyes snaps, glaring. “I saw the blue light. That kind of power can only come from an exceptionally powerful being, and I _know_ it was the Avatar. You will hand him over, or I’ll melt your pathetic little village to the ground.”

Blue light? What’s this guy talking about, Sokka wonders. Or – wait. Wasn’t there a big beam of light when Aang busted out of his iceberg? Sokka’s not certain, since, you know – he was kinda busy trying to _not die_ what with the churning ocean and the cracking ‘berg and the drama of the whole moment and all. But, yeah. He _thinks_ there was a light? But whatever, the existence (or lack thereof) of a light doesn’t actually matter. The important part of what ~~his soulmate~~ the firebender just threatened is the part where he said “I’ll melt your pathetic little village to the ground.”

Sokka steps back into a fighting stance again.

“Over my dead body,” he snarls.

The firebender raises his hands and positions his feet.

“That can be arranged,” he says, his voice as ice cold as the snow they’re surrounded by.

……………………………………………

It’s not a fair fight, in the end.

Sokka’s a good warrior, but he’s at two distinct disadvantages in this fight. 

One, he’s not a bender, and this other guy ~~his **soulmate**~~ is. The only way Sokka can land a hit on the jerkbender is by getting up close and personal and getting past the guy’s defences with one of his weapons, because most of them are close-range only. Sokka’s only long-range weapon is his boomerang, and while his boomerang is great, it doesn’t exactly leap automatically back into his hand after each throw, so unless Sokka’s able to run and fetch it where it’s landed during the middle of the fight, it’s sort of a one-hit wonder, and then its close range weapons only after that.

The firebending asshole, on the other hand, can send balls of fire and ribbons of fire and he can flood the deck of his whole stupid metal ship with fire, and he doesn’t have to be remotely close to Sokka to do it.

Secondly, it’s been over two years since Sokka’s had anyone his own age or older to train against. Or to brawl viciously with, as was more often the case. His father would train with him, but the other warriors wouldn’t, and the boys in the village were more likely to corner him and set upon him in teams of three or more, rather than actually train with him. Though, fighting with them _did_ kinda count as training, to be honest. Sokka got very good at dealing with more than one enemy at a time, thanks to them.

But the point is, Sokka’s been the only boy left in the village over the age of fourteen for two years now. He can train the children, but it’s not like any of them offer him enough of a challenge that it keeps his own skills sharp, and Katara didn’t want anything to do with traditional fighting methods. And yeah, sure, he’s trained on his own, in the years since his dad and the warriors left. Every day, in fact.

But there’s only so much that fighting by yourself can prepare you for, and while Sokka _has_ practiced daily on his own, the firebender has clearly never had even a single day where he was short of training companions, much less two _years._

  
Still, Sokka gets a few hits in – and even manages to slip the boning knife in under the edge of one of the firebender’s greaves to slice a line into his forearm, which makes the boy hiss furiously – but ultimately, their fight comes to an abrupt end with the sound of Sokka’s head cracking hard against the metal of the ship’s deck.

The firebender had sent a pair of fire-punches at Sokka, who was too busy dodging them to see the ring of ground-level fire that the bender sent out immediately afterwards, and the force of the fire hitting his ankles is enough to take both feet out from under him, and Sokka goes down hard and doesn’t manage to catch himself before his forehead hits the metal deck with enough force that he possibly blacks out for a second.

He thinks he must, actually, because one second the firebender is a few metres away and the next he’s right _there,_ tugging Sokka’s club out of his hands and throwing it over the ship’s railing. Sokka’s knife is yanked out of his other hand a moment later, and everything is registering with Sokka just a second too late for him to do anything about it. It’s like there’s a delay between reality and Sokka’s perception of it. By the time he starts protesting the theft of his club, the knife is being taken too, and before he’s even managed to say, “Hey” about that, he’s being hauled upright by the back of his parka.

And ohhhh, being upright, wow, that’s…. that’s something that Sokka wants to stop being immediately. There's a ringing in his ears and his eyesight is kinda choppy, and the world is _spinning,_ and his face is wet? Oh, blood, he realises. He’s bleeding. That’s fun.

The texture below his feet changes abruptly, and that’s the first he realises that he’s been marched down the gangplank and is back on the snow, and he’s barely registered that before he’s being shoved down into it, and he goes down in a graceless pile of limbs.

The shock of the snow hitting his face helps him get his senses back a little bit, though, and he pushes himself up a little, shaking his head in an attempt to clear his brain – and then immediately regrets having done so thanks to how it makes him want to throw up.

He swallows down hard on the urge to vomit, and tries to force his brain back into action with sheer willpower.

It _kind of_ works. The world is still spinning, but his ears tune back in just in time to hear the firebending jerk halfway through a sentence that’s both smug and derisive all at the same time.

“….on’t stand a chance against my men and I if _this_ is the best warrior you have to offer. Don’t bother putting up a fight.”

But the jerkbender is counting his polargulls before they hatch. Sokka’s not _quite_ out for the count. Not just yet.

It takes an absurd amount of energy to push himself to his feet, and he wobbles dangerously once he gets there, but he manages it, and he takes two staggering steps forward to plant himself between the firebender (who’s still the only one off the ship, shit, he needs _all of them off_ before Aang can strike) and the villagers who are clustered in a fearful huddle around the low-burning fire.

The bender snarls in irritation at Sokka, glaring, and the second they make eye contact, Sokka feels that low, churning, warm _contentment_ start to quietly bubble in his chest again. The other must feel it too, because they both break eye-contact with each other immediately; Sokka glares at the bender’s stupid pointy chin instead, and the bender glares at Sokka’s ear.

“Do you _want_ me to put you down permanently?” Blue-Eyes demands. “You’re beaten. Stay in the snow, wait for us to leave, and let your mother stitch you back together.”

“Don’t have a mother,” Sokka says, and his words are only _slightly_ slurred, go him. “A firebender killed her.”

Peripherally, Sokka sees the bender’s eyes widen for a second at that, before a cool, deliberate look of detached irritation slips back over his expression.

“My point stands,” the teen – because he is only a teenager, is _maybe_ a year older than Sokka, if that – says. “I don’t want to kill you, but I will if I have to. Step aside.”

“No,” Sokka says with as fierce a glare as he can muster, and then he immediately sways dangerously, which probably ruins the effect a little.

That, of course, is when Kani pipes up.

“We want no part of whatever treachery the traitor has orchestrated,” she calls from just a few metres behind him, her voice firm and carrying, and Sokka twitches with surprised betrayal. She _still_ thinks he’s to blame for this? He just fought this guy for her – for all of them –nearly got his feet melted off and practically broke his face for them, is standing between them and the threat, and she _still_ thinks he’s on the Fire Nation’s side?

He deliberately steels his expression and tries to hide whatever emotions are currently on his face – some kind of combination of hurt and surprise, most like; he’s gotten good at masking his feelings, most of the time, but sometimes things surprise him – and he sends a dark glare at the firebender (because turning around to look at Kani would require more balance than Sokka currently has, and also, this is all the firebender’s fault).

The firebender looks momentarily startled by Kani’s words, the eye on the non-scarred side of his face flaring wide for a second before he manages to shield his expression again. 

(And up close, standing right in front of him, Sokka can see that the scarred side of the bender’s face has a limited range of movement. The skin around his eye is puckered and taut, and limits movement. It’s definitely a burn scar. Enough of the men in Sokka’s village have old scars from the Fire Nation that it’s easily recognisable. It’s a surprise to see someone _from_ the Fire Nation with a burn scar. Sokka would have assumed they were all immune to fire. Apparently not.)

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the blue-eyed bender sneers in response to Kani, sounding both disgusted and angry – though what he has to be angry about, Sokka doesn’t know.

The bender’s next words, he speaks loudly, addressing his words to the gathered villagers as a whole.

“My crew and I are looking for the Avatar,” he announces, standing tall with his fists clenched at his sides, outright ignoring Sokka’s presence in front of him. “If he shows himself to us, and comes peacefully, then no harm will come to this… village.”

He says the word village hesitantly, like he’s not sure it deserves to be called that, and it makes Sokka hate him a little bit more.

“We don’t _have_ the Avatar,” Sokka says again, exasperated.

(And hey, the fog in his head is starting to clear. He feels a little bit less wobbly, too. He’s not _better,_ not by a long shot – but he’s swaying slightly less and his vision is a little bit less spinny. Yay.)

That, of course, is when Aang decides to make himself known.

Sokka only gets a moment’s warning – he hears his sister, distant but _desperate_ – saying, “Aang, _no_ —” and then two seconds later, the weird little kid who caused all this darts through the snow to come to a stop next to Sokka, a hard, mulish expression on his face.

“If the Avatar leaves with you, you’ll leave this village alone?” the kid asks, challengingly, and the blue-eyed bender turns a cold but curious eye to the kid.

“On my honour, I swear it,” the guy says, and holds a fist to his heart and everything.

“Ok,” Aang says. And then: “I’m the Avatar.”

Huh. Maybe Sokka’s head isn’t recovering as fast as he thought.

“You?” the blue-eyed bender snorts, derisive. “The Avatar has to be at least a hundred and –”

“And twelve, right?” Aang interrupts, leaning casually on his weird staff. “Yeah, see, there was this thing. A storm. And I think I got frozen for a while. As in, _a hundred years_ kind of a while. Cause Katara told me the date, and some of the things that have been going on, and she wouldn’t lie to me, which means –”

“The Avatar is an airbender,” the firebender snaps, apparently running out of patience for Aang’s ramblings.

“Oh,” Aang says, sounding startled, and then he pops the wings out of his staff thing and takes off. He does a loop above their heads, and lands next to Sokka again.

“I’m definitely an airbender,” the kid says, cheerfully earnest. And then he adds, “And also the Avatar. I promise.”

The firebender’s expression had been shocked when Aang had taken to the air, but it settles into hard lines at the kid’s announcement.

“I’m a man of my word,” he says. “Get on my ship, and I’ll leave this village.”

“Woah, hey, nope,” Sokka says, taking an unsteady but determined step in front of Aang. Sokka can still remember the village’s grief the last time people were dragged from this village onto a Fire Nation ship, never to be seen again. He’s not letting that kind of grief happen to his sister. Not if he can help it. “He’s not going with you. Absolutely not.”

“Sokka, you can barely stand,” Aang says, and the firebender twitches when the kid says Sokka’s name. “You can’t fight them all. I have to go with them.”

“I am _not_ letting Katara grieve you,” Sokka snarls, glaring furiously at the kid.

Aang smiles at Sokka.

“It’ll be ok, Sokka,” the kid says, and then he pops his glider out and leaps onto it, getting airborne for just long enough to fly over to and land on the enemy ship, where he’s immediately surrounded by soldiers.

It all happened too quickly for Sokka to manage to grab the kid, and it’s possible that he’s still having processing delay issues, or it’s possible that the kid is just _that_ quick. Could be both.

“If you hurt him, I swear –” Sokka starts, glaring at the firebender, and Blue Eyes looks at him. The bubbling warmth starts in Sokka’s chest again the second their eyes lock, but he endures it this time, glaring at the bender and refusing to be the one to break eye contact.

Blue Eyes looks away first, after just a second or so, and straightens the cuffs on his stupid pointy uniform.

“As promised,” he says, and his voice is quieter than when he was talking to the whole village, but no less firm. “We shall leave your village unharmed.”

He turns, then, and walks away. Back to his ship, and away from Sokka.

And Sokka’s heart spasms with pain.

So does the firebender’s, judging by the way the guy falters to a stop and brings a hand up to press against his armour-plated chest.

But he doesn’t turn back. Doesn’t even _look_ back – not that Sokka even _wants_ him to – and after a moment, the bender balls his fingers into a tight fist and drops his hand away from his chest and starts walking towards his ship again, and Sokka knows that the guy’s heart is still doing the painful spasm thing, because Sokka’s is, but the bender’s stride is determined and stiff as he walks resolutely away.

And Sokka wants to do more than just stand there letting all this happen – wants to charge up the gangplank and free Aang from where they’re currently clapping his wrists into cuffs linked by a short chain; wants to run after the bender and turn him around to face him and just _look_ at him; drink him in and commit the details of his face to memory, track the constellations of patterns in his eyes, feel that bubbling warmth in his own chest and _not_ pull away from it this time – but he can barely stand, and he’s swaying on his feet, so rescuing Aang is out, and his stupid emotions are only wanting those other things because of stupid soulmate bullshittery, and his soulmate is _evil,_ and Sokka doesn’t want anything to do with him.

The bender walks away and doesn’t look back, and Sokka watches him go and doesn’t chase after him, and he stubbornly keeps his balled fists down at his sides instead of pressing his hands against the pain in his chest, and meanwhile Aang is taken below deck by the soldiers and no one swoops in to rescue him, and it’s only as the airbender – as the _Avatar –_ looks past Sokka as he’s being dragged away that Sokka realises that Katara is nowhere around, and that that’s very odd.

As though his thoughts have summoned her, Sokka hears her approaching from behind.

“ _No!”_ she shrieks, and Sokka turns to see her running towards him, and she’s got snow clinging to every bit of clothing and clumps of the stuff in her hair, and Sokka reacts instinctively and reaches out to catch her as she makes to run past him.

“ _No,_ Sokka, let me _go –_ Aang! _Aang!”_

“There’s too many of them, Katara, we won’t be able to get him,” Sokka says, holding onto her as tightly as he can and digging his heels into the snow in an attempt to hold her back. She writhes in his grip, and he closes his eyes and braces himself against her, ignoring the throbbing of his head and the way the world spins wildly, because she doesn’t stand a chance against a ship full of enemy soldiers, and Sokka would rather have her hate him for eternity for holding her back, rather than lose her to a Fire Nation ship.

It’s one or maybe two seconds later that Sokka hears the horrid metal gangplank screech as it’s raised, followed immediately by the sound of churning water as the ship backs up and pulls away from the decimated shoreline, and Katara writhes and squirms and screams in Sokka’s hold the whole time, but Sokka locks his arms and braces as much as he can and _somehow_ manages to keep a hold of her.

After what feels like a lifetime, she finally sags in his hold and lets out a wail that takes makes Sokka’s lungs constrict in his chest, and he’s not holding her back so much now as holding her _up._

Now that she’s not fighting him, he cautiously opens his eyes to see if the world is still spinning – and it is, a little, but less violently now than it was when Katara was throwing herself desperately all over the place in her attempts to get free.

The second Sokka’s eyes are open, he seeks out the ship – now twenty metres or so off shore, and with one person standing at the railing, looking back at their village.

It’s the bender, and while Sokka can’t see the colour of his eyes from here, he can tell that the boy is looking right at Sokka.

Sokka stares right back at him, the horrible jagged and hollow feeling still in his chest, as he holds Katara up while she wails desolately, and he watches until the figure on the ship is too far away to be seen anymore.

It’s only then – once the ship is far enough away that it looks like it really is leaving without further issue; no fireballs sent back at them or a ‘ha, we tricked you, we’re gonna raze your village after all’ plot twist – that any of the rest of the villagers approach. Cautious, still, but starting to chatter with relief as they approach the broken iceshelf to assess the damage, or try to get closer to the edge so they can keep watching the ship as it gets further away and smaller with every second.

And Sokka stands there, smudged warpaint on his face and a broken-hearted sister in his arms, and watches the ship carry his soulmate further and further away.

He doesn’t realise that there’s tears on his face until Gran Gran comes up beside him and reaches up to sweep them away.

He jerks out of her reach, startled by the tender action. His warpaint smears against the back of his hand a moment later as he lets go of Katara with one hand and swipes viciously at his own face.

“Gran Gran,” Katara sobs, twisting out of Sokka’s loosened hold and turning to bury her face in Gran Gran’s parka instead. “They took him – they _took him!_ What am I going to _do?”_

Poor Katara, Sokka thinks sympathetically, as his own gaze returns to the horizon and the rapidly shrinking ship. Doesn’t even have her soulmate for a full day before the Fire Nation swoops and kidnaps him.

Is that better or worse than meeting your soulmate while he’s attacking your village, Sokka wonders absently, and he finally gives in and brings up a hand to rub at his chest as though he can scrub away the ragged wound that’s sitting in his heart.

It doesn’t work. Sokka drops his hand and tries to breathe through the pain.

“ – and he _buried me_ in _snow, why would he do that,_ Gran Gran, I – by the time I got free it was too late _,_ I couldn’t catch him, why – ” Katara is wailing, furious and devastated and heartbroken in equal measure.

“He was trying to protect you, child,” Gran Gran says, soothing, but Katara is in no mood to be soothed.

“I could have _helped,_ I could have _fought them off,_ I could have – ”

Sokka walks away.

He doesn’t want to hear this, doesn’t want to face Katara’s grief and fury and heartbreak. Doesn’t want the reminder of how badly he failed. Failed Katara, failed Aang, failed his whole village. Sure, ok, the village is still standing and they didn’t have a single fire-induced fatality, but that’s only because Aang volunteered himself for capture. If Aang hadn’t done that, Sokka would be looking at a pile of burned and melted huts right now. Sokka wouldn’t have able to stop it. He wasn’t able to stop _one_ firebender. The other soldiers hadn’t even fought, in the end; hadn’t _needed_ to. It was just the – just Sokka’s _soulmate._

And, ok, maybe Sokka needs a bit of time to process that, too. Maybe that’s part of the reason he walks away from Katara and Gran Gran without a word. Because sure, ok, he’s always known that his soulmate was Fire Nation. But having the guy rock up on Sokka’s front doorstep as the _leader of an invading ship_ was still… something of a shock.

Firstly – Sokka never planned to meet his soulmate. He was never gonna go searching for them, and the only time he’d planned on meeting any Fire Nation citizens at all was on the _front line of the war_ , where he would be busy _fighting_ them and _killing them_ and not looking into any of their eyes to see if they were his heart’s match. So – Sokka never thought he would meet his soulmate. Never _wanted_ to, and _certainly_ didn’t expect to meet him at home, deep in Southern territory, mere metres away from the ice-hut Sokka grew up in – mere metres from the ice-hut his mother was _murdered in._

And secondly – it turns out that Sokka’s soulmate isn’t just some… some regular, ordinary civilian who happens to be Fire Nation but who, like, works in a merchant shop or something. Which wouldn’t be _awesome,_ of course, because even a Fire Nation merchant is still _Fire Nation_ , but it would have been the least offensive of all available options, if they weren’t even a soldier _._ If they had never fought or _killed_ on behalf of their evil country.

But no – not only is Sokka’s soulmate definitely a soldier, he isn’t even just… a regular soldier who’s just following orders. A plain old infantryman who signed up to the army because the income from it was the only possible way to feed his family, or whatever. Some poor schmuck who’s only in the army at all because it’s the only available career option in a nation that’s been waging war for a hundred years, but who at heart just wants to run a nice little petting zoo, or _something_.

No – no, instead, Sokka’s soulmate is some kind of Fire Nation _leader_. He was front and centre on that ship, and he was the one who did all of the demanding, and his armour was a blatantly different style to that of everyone else on the ship. He’s obviously a Captain or a Lieutenant or a Commander, or whatever terms of leadership Fire Nation barbarians use for their military chain of command. The guy isn’t just some kid who got enrolled in the army because it was the only way to support his family – he’s an active and _willing_ participant in the war.

Sokka’s _soulmate_ is an active and willing participant in – a _leader of –_ the tyranny that the Fire Nation is trying to spread across the globe.

Tui. _That’s_ his heartmatch. Sokka…. Sokka thinks he might throw up. 

Nope, scratch that, there’s no maybe about it; he’s _definitely_ going to–––

Yep.

When he resurfaces from the snowpile he’s just emptied his stomach into, Gran Gran is there, and she’s got a hand on his back.

“Think I’ve got a concussion,” Sokka manages, hoarse, because that’s _definitely_ the reason he just vomited all over the snow, _yep,_ abso _lutely._ It has _nothing_ to do with finding out who his soulmate is, no-siree, absolutely not. Sokka grabs a handful of untarnished snow and shoves it into his mouth, chewing on it for just long enough that it melts and he can spit it – and the lingering taste of vomit – out of his mouth.

Gran Gran is still there when he’s done, which is surprising.

“Let me look at it,” she says, which is even more surprising, and she turns him around by his shoulders until she can get a good look at his face. She doesn’t look at his eyes, but that’s _not_ surprising. As usual, Sokka doesn’t look at hers either and instead keeps his gaze locked on the fur at the collar of her parka as she inspects his forehead.

“It will scar,” she says, after a long moment, probing fingers touching gently around his left eyebrow and retracting when he hisses and flinches in response to a particularly tender spot getting touched. “But so long as you keep it clean and prevent infection, it should heal nicely.”

She withdraws her hand and looks Sokka up and down.

“Your first war wound,” she says, and she sounds… odd. If she was speaking to Katara, Sokka would say she sounded proud, but that’s hardly an emotion she’s likely to be directing at Sokka.

“I’m sure the scar will look very handsome,” she continues, and Sokka can’t help the odd look he gives her. Handsome? What is she talking about? As if someone with orange eyes could ever hope to be _handsome._ And who the hell for, anyway? It’s not like he’s trying to impress a soulmate, after all.

“Katara is packing supplies,” Gran Gran says, as though she didn’t see the baffled expression he pulled in response to the handsome comment, and Sokka blinks at her words.

Gran Gran smiles, warm and frank, and brushes some snow off his shoulder.

“I _know_ you’re planning to go after Aang,” she says, and – Huh. He is, isn’t he? He’s absolutely planning to go after that stupid, ugly, metal-and-steam Fire Nation monstrosity of a ship to fetch Aang back.

Because Sokka wasn’t kidding, when he told the kid he wasn’t going to let Katara grieve for her soulmate. Sokka’s seen too many people in his village deal with the fallout of losing a soulmate to a Fire Nation ship and a distant horizon, and he will _die_ before he lets that same emotional devastation befall his sister.

Plus. Even if the kid _wasn’t_ Katara’s soulmate, he still gave up his own freedom for the sake of Sokka’s village. Aang deserves to be rescued for that alone.

“…Yeah,” he says, exhaling heavily. “I’m going after him.”

He’s got no idea how he’s going to pull this off, of course. He’s got a concussion and a canoe, and that’s about it right now, and he’s going up against a military-grade assault ship packed to the brim with hostile soldiers, one of whom ~~is his heart’s match~~ has already beaten Sokka literally into the snow. So Sokka doesn’t know _how_ he’s going to rescue Aang, but he knows he’s going to manage it or die trying.

(Die trying seems much more likely, but frankly, only a couple hours ago, Sokka was certain he was going to die defending his tribe from invasion, so really, the fact that he’s still alive to even attempt a suicide-rescue-mission is exceeding his own expectations.)

Gran Gran claps him warmly on the shoulder.

“Good lad,” she says, and fusses at the collar of his parka, straightening it and drawing it closer to his throat, her eyes locked on the ties there instead of on his face. “Now – I know you’ll look after your sister, so I won’t tell you to. But you make sure you look after yourself, too. There’s a lot of folks been hurt by the Fire Nation, and there’s a lot out there who won’t take kindly to someone with your eyes.”

Sokka blinks and then glances away from the stitching at the throat of Gran Gran’s parka, looking out over the water instead.

He’s… not quite sure what to do with her warning, to be honest. Does she think he doesn’t know that people react badly to him because of his eyes? He’s very, _very_ aware. He’s really not sure why she’s warning him.

Does… does she think he’s expecting people to be kinder, out there? Hardly. He might not have travelled the world or anything, but he knows that the Fire Nation has been waging war on _everyone._ If his own tribe hates him for his eyes…

His tribe _knows_ him – they’ve seen him grow up and seen him pour his heart and soul into protecting and providing for the tribe – and they _still_ hate him. People who don’t know him? People who will meet him for the first time, and will see his eyes, and will judge him entirely based on those?

Yeah, Sokka isn’t expecting the rest of the world to react very well to him. At all. 

“It’s fine,” he settles for saying, instead of voicing any of his thoughts. “It’s not like I don’t have experience with that sort of thing.”

Peripherally, he sees her smile sadly.

“You’ll be alright,” she says, and pats him on the shoulder. “Now. I’ve got Katara packing food for your journey, and she’ll probably be ready soon. You’d best get your canoe prepped.”

She bustles off, and Sokka watches her go. He wonders, distantly, if he’ll ever see her again.

Probably not.

He’s going to launch a two-person assault on a Fire Nation military vessel. Sokka very much doubts he’s going to walk away from the encounter, whether his soulmate is in charge of said ship or not.

But it’s fine. Sokka made peace with dying earlier today; he’s not going to suddenly baulk at the concept now.

As long as he gets Aang out of there, it will be fine. It will be worth it.

Sokka turns on his heel, steeling himself, and heads towards where his favourite canoe is docked.

He’s got some preparations to make.

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be a oneshot. That….. was a concept that lasted until around the 17k mark. It was around about then that I realised that this…. was not going to be a oneshot. This _one installment_ is over 18k, you guys, I – . What have I got myself into. Merlin’s _beard_ , I’m writing a slow-burn. I’ve never written a slowburn in my _life,_ this is _uncharted territory for me._
> 
> There’s another several thousand words that are already written for the next installments of this (I cannot _wait_ until Toph arrives) and future installments will obviously include a lot more actual face to face Zukka time. I know there wasn't loads of Zukka content in this piece, but this one really sets the scene for the rest. 
> 
> Make sure you subscribe to the 'Window to the Soul' series to get updates, not to this individual fic, as each portion will be posted as a new oneshot. 
> 
> Anyway, I hope y’all are staying safe during this time of global crisis. I’m an essential worker; at this stage I’m still going to work full time, so unfortunately you will _not_ be seeing a flurry of updates from me during this period (as much as I would love to entertain you all with many, many words). To my fellow essential workers: chin up, we’ll get through this, keep yourself well-hydrated, and give yourself as much down-time as you can. To everyone who’s not an essential worker, stay home as much as you can, look after your loved ones and yourselves, and drink lots of water. See you on the other side. Xx


End file.
